lsloan

I wanted to know: How can I get the current timestamp for UTC in ISO 8601 format to appear in the body data of a Postman request?

After reading some of the Postman documentation and online comments, this is the solution (using Postman v5.0.1 for Chrome 58.0.3029.110 on macOS 10.12.5) I used:

1. In the Builder, while editing a request, click the "Pre-request Script" heading below the URL field.

2. In the editor field that appears, enter this single line of JavaScript:

   postman.setGlobalVariable('timestampUtcIso8601', (new Date()).toISOString());

lsloan

import os
import subprocess

def get_google_news_homepage():
    print("this will fetch the current google news home page as text.")
    print("it will use the requests and lxml libaries")
    print("press enter to continue")
    input()

    import requests

lsloan

Vim Notebook

Notes about using the vim editor, especially useful regular expressions (regex, regexes).

• Run an external command on all matching lines

  :g/pattern/.!command

  It's important that the dot command (.) appear between the search pattern and the bang (!) beginning the external command.

lsloan

Editing remote files in Vim with SSH

1. Configure SSH

   In ~/.ssh/config, include the lines:

   Host *
   ControlPath ~/.ssh/sockets/%r@%h-%p
   

lsloan

#!/bin/sh --

# Execute with an argument containing the name of the property to be
# used for sorting.

# Improved according to a suggestion from @pkoppstein in response to my
# support issue:
# https://github.com/stedolan/jq/issues/1447#issuecomment-314918635

jq --slurp --compact-output 'sort_by(.'${1}')[]'

lsloan

Depersonalize JSON

Why

If JSON data is to be shared for analysis, it's often necessary to depersonalize the data first. Depersonalization is different than anonymization. If data is anonymized, all information about the user is removed. Depersonalization, however, changes the user information to values that can't be recognized as being related to the real user. This way, it's still possible to see relationships within the data.

lsloan

While working on a project that produces JSON and sends it to a server using an HTTP POST request, I found it sometimes inconvenient to start the server every time I needed it. Most of the time, unless I was working on the server code itself, I just wanted to see the raw request data. I learned that the nc utility (AKA Netcat) could do just that.

However, using nc the way others explained it didn't work well for my purposes. It turns out that it shouldn't be run in the background, as was suggested, and it should give a proper HTTP response to satisfy the client. I came up with this solution:

while [[ 1 ]]; do printf 'HTTP/1.1 200 OK\n\n' | nc -l localhost 8000; printf '\n\n= = = = = %s = = = = =\n\n' "$(date)"; done

It's helpful to run this in a shell in a separate window. As new requests are received, they will be seen scrolling up the display.

lsloan

Normal Text

Some Links:
Link 1 | Link 2 | Link 3

lsloan

sudo /bin/env bash

lsloan

I wish Markdown supported this formatting:

• Italics: /fubar/ → fubar (not _fubar_ or *fubar*)
• Bold: *tarfu* → tarfu (not **tarfu** or __tarfu__)
• Underline: _snafu_ → snafu (new feature, not allowed by GitHub)
• Strikethrough: ~bohica~ → bohica (GitHub supports this)